Assembly: Cerastus Knight Castigator, Part 3

Finally had more time to work on this. So we are starting on the arms. More specifically I am going to start with the left arm which is the gun arm. The reason being that, despite how poseable this model is, the gun arm is more static due to the large gun ammo belt. I suppose it could be heat warped to fit differently, but it's not something I feel comfortable tackling. As a result, it is going to heavily dictate the final position of the torso.



In the picture above I have the pieces for the arms shown. This doesn't include the gun or sword arm parts. These are the upper arms and elbows.

Yes, I know I need to clip my finger nails. Hush!

Each upper arms is comprised of the base (the large circular part on the left in the top pic), a barrel like shoulder piece, and two side frames. You get two of each frame and each shoulder piece goes together the same and are interchangeable, so you don't have to worry if one is the right or left should assembly.you fit the main shoulder piece and the two support frames together like the picture, hoses down. You then put glue on the ends of the support frames and attach it to the shoulder base keeping the large piston hole down.

When finished, you end up with two pieces like this. The upper shoulder part ends up being free moving since you didn't glue the support frames to it. This is critical for final arm positioning.

 Next, I glued together the gun. It comes in three pieces: The barrels, the shield, and the gun chassis. I glued them together and set them upright to dry completely.

After that I glued the ammo pack to the back of the torso.

 The next part of the assembly is the elbow and arm piece. There's a trick to them.

 If you look closely at the depression in the upper arm piece, you can see a small cut out at the top and bottom.

And if you look at this piece, on opposite sides there's a half circle protrusion with a bolt. (Right by my thumb nail) The cut outs in the arm piece are meant to go over that half circle and bolt. So line it up correctly. This is not mentioned in the instructions.

I spent some time dry fitting the pieces with sticky tack, however the pieces were heavy enough it didn't work out too well. It worked well enough for me to get the final positioning and I got the shoulder assembly glued in place. I also glued the ammo belt to the gun after determining which way it needed to be positioned. 

So here's the way I figured out how to get it all together. I put glue int he slot on the ammo pack where the ammo belt was meant to go, and I put glue on the post on the shoulder where the arm pieces was to go. I then held the elbow and arm piece together on the gun like this. These were not glued in place. I then put it together.

After getting it together, I propped it up on a spare piece of resin sprue and let gravity do the work while it dried. After it had set I went back and applied thin super glue to the unglued joints and let it seep into the cracks then propped it up again.

 I decided to dry fit the torso on to see how it was going to end up positioned. This was a more or less straight on position. Gun forward. As you can see, the gun and ammo belt make contact with the leg (which to be fair, is not straight up and down) and it lists too far to the side and actually raises up off the ball joint.

It'll have to be positioned facing left. In this position it sits fully on the ball joint. I'm good with this. It gives a bit more of a dynamic pose in my opinion. The one thing I neglected to do was to put the shoulder piston in before getting it all glued in place. At this point, there's no way I'm going to get it in there. Fortunately, it's something that I don't think people will notice. Remember to put yours in first before getting it all together! :)